Years back there were some hardware RAM disks such as Gigabyte i-RAM floating around but nobody makes such things anymore.
Today we have adequately fast interconnects (PCIe 3.0), high density DRAM (now at 4Gbit, 8Gbit should be around in a year), though finding the memory controller might be a problem.

take one PCIe 3.0 x16 board

slap some eight-or-so DDR3 slots on it

add a lithium polymer battery-UPS to make the bits stay flipped when it's disconnected from 5VSB

find a bootable controller that can do it all

You get a 64GB(-128GB+) OS/apps RAM SSD that can deliver 10-16GB/s (PCIe 3.0 x16 cap) at nanosecond-scale access latency.
Flash SSDs would be nearly obsolete - until MRAM or such comes around to desktops near you.

What would it be, that imaginary piece o' hardware, your nerdy heart desires?

A video card that you can just upgrade like a motherboard where you could replace the GPU when something new comes out and add memory/ram if needed

Click to expand...

I think you could upgrade the memory on some cards from the late 90's/early 2k's, iirc..

Me I'm not sure.. What happened to the OLED monitors we were promised some time ago? To expensive in big monitors? Otherwise I can't really think of anything feasible. A combined legacy PCIe card would be pretty nice actually.

Honestly, I'm pretty satisfied with the hardware I have now, but my 28" with a pixel density similar to that of a retina display would be pretty awesome but then I would need new video cards to drive the beast.

I feel adequate display tech is where the PC and HT markets are hurting most, so I'd like to see PLED HDTVs, at least a 32" to start. Cavendish Labs (formerly Cambridge U students) were the first to discover that polymer (vs organic) LEDs have a MUCH longer lifespan, about the same as CRT, or roughly 100,000 hrs.

What makes organic LEDs (OLED) so vulnerable is humidity. The organic substrate, particularly when displaying the blue color spectrum, deteriorates easily from tiny amounts of moisture, and as a result, OLED inherently has a very short life span because of it.

Most studies conducted have shown blue color spectrum OLEDs to last only about 10,000 hrs. Somehow Sony came up with 30,000 hr lifespan on their OLED sets, I assume because blue is just one third of the R,B,G equation. Sharp refuted Sony's claim, but even if it's accurate, 30,000 hrs is only half the lifespan of the typical LCD.

This is one of the main reasons you don't see a lot of OLED screen products except for small ones like cell phones that people don't keep as long. Manufacturers are looking at color filtering a black and white image, similar to DLP, to overcome the OLED lifespan problem. It seems to me all that could be avoided with PLED, and there probably wouldn't be big royalties associated with it like there is with Kodak on OLED, whom invented that tech.

Last I checked, Philips was the only TV brand backing PLED, so if we see a PLED set sometime in the next few years, it will likely be a Philips.

We're not too far out, relatively speaking, from having enough power to ray trace @ HD resolution. So the hardware I'd like to see made is the Xeon Phi... which is being made. Talk about low-hanging fruit.

They should try get rid of every cable in our PC, a fully wireless computer system including power. They should already make it happen by now, some of the technology already exist. i want to say goodbye to 6-8 hours of cable management like the last time i change my PSU.

and a fully automated and integrated beer supply and serving system in my PC for the long hours of gaming.

20 to 30 inch monitor made with plasma technology, at 1920x1200 or better resolution and always a 16:10 aspect ratio.

This would have all the advantages of CRT with none of the downsides. We'd get pictures rendered in gorgeous colour and best of all, zero lag or motion smear! The icing on the cake would be a 120Hz+ refresh rate for 3D or even smoother video animation.

20 to 30 inch monitor made with plasma technology, at 1920x1200 or better resolution and always a 16:10 aspect ratio.

This would have all the advantages of CRT with none of the downsides. We'd get pictures rendered in gorgeous colour and best of all, zero lag or motion smear! The icing on the cake would be a 120Hz+ refresh rate for 3D or even smoother video animation.

Remember Time Crisis and games like that? I want games like those on a PC.
I suppose I'm saying I want a monitor with scan lines so we can play games with a shooty-gun on a PC. One thing that consoles have had over PC's.

They should try get rid of every cable in our PC, a fully wireless computer system including power. They should already make it happen by now, some of the technology already exist.

Click to expand...

Even wireless ISP connections fluctuate quite often in speed and reliability. I would think that would be a latency/overall speed nightmare, unless the wireless tech were so advanced it would be cost prohibitive to most.

I'd rather see miniature fiber optic cables being used than going completely wireless. Well, technically FO is "wire"less when you think about it.